It’s February, so ALMOST time for our semi-annual ‘Free Trial Online French Lesson’ offer on EasyReaders.Org!

The next promotion of this type won’t be until November 2021, so why not take the chance to try an online French lesson (via Skype or Zoom) with one of our friendly mother-tongue teachers, at a cost of exactly ZERO?

Note that our free online language lessons are normally priced at £20 each (you’d pay less per lesson for packs of ten, twenty or thirty 30-minute lesson credits – see prices.)

N.b. You don’t have to buy a lesson to get one free, we won’t even ask for your card details – all we need to organise your French lesson is your email address (which you see, we already have…)

When we receive your order, we’ll email you a brief questionnaire to find out your existing level in French and whether you have any particular needs or preferences for your 30-minute trial.

Be assured – this is a genuinely-free offer! But if you’re uninterested in hearing more about next week’s promotion, SCROLL DOWN NOW and click the unsubscribe link – it takes just seconds to permanently remove your email address from our database.

Offer details:

• The Free Trial Online French Lesson offer begins on Monday February 8th and ends on Sunday February 14th 2021
• There’s no need to actually DO your free lesson that week, just ‘book’ it
• This offer is for NEW STUDENTS ONLY
• After completing your online French lesson, you’ll be sent a 15% discount coupon which gets you a one-time discount on additional lessons, to incentivize you to continue (view prices)
• Besides that coupon, we have four 20%-Off promotions each year (in the spring, the summer, the fall, and at New Year), so most of our regular students pay 20% less than the prices you see in the shop, here

Browse our catalog of French lessons and ebooks, where you’ll also find free ebook downloads for learners of French and certain other languages.

You’re getting this email because, at some point in the past, you joined the mailing list at OnlineFrenchClub.com.

But perhaps you’re no longer interested in learning French, and so won’t want to hear about next week’s FREE Trial Lesson offer (online, 30-minutes one-to-one with a real French teacher, normal price £20!)

In which case, we’d really prefer not to bother you. Please SCROLL DOWN and click the ‘unsubscribe’ link, which you’ll find at the bottom of this article.

You’ll be given the option to permanently remove your email address from our mailing list. It takes just a second or two.

Still here? Excellent!

There’ll be more about the FREE Trial Online Lesson offer next week, when we have everything ready…

In the meantime, though, here’s a reminder about some of the free resources we have for learning French that you might have forgotten about:

• This website, OnlineFrenchClub.com, has FREE material for learning French at any level
• DontSpeakFrench.com is a FREE online beginners’ French course comprising fifty or so pages of grammar explanations, exercises, vocabulary lists and listening practice… It’s also ours!
• And not to forget our online shop, which features ebooks for learning French and online lessons with a friendly native-speaker teacher (you can try one FREE, details next week, remember?)

À la semaine prochaine!

Learning French?

Then you’ll need to write French characters on your various devices – computer, tablet, smartphone and so on – even if it’s only for instant messaging!

And that can be a pain.

I’m writing this in English, on a computer with an Italian keyboard.

That doesn’t present a problem, as I’m used to it.

But when I switch to the FRA (French) keyboard option, via the icon in the Windows 10 taskbar at the bottom of the screen, what is printed on the computer keys doesn’t match what I need to type.

Like hardly at all!

This is so weird…

Where have they put the numbers?

Typing anything is impossible, let alone finding the e’s with the accents on, and getting the right-way-around one.

Oh dear!

Where are the French characters on my keyboard??

OK, what I need is a MAP!

First I have to make sure that I’ve added the French keyboard to whichever device I want to use to write with.

If you haven’t, Google how to do that…

Then I make sure I’ve actually selected the right keyboard, which isn’t usually hard but is easy to forget.

What I should see then, when I type (irrespective of what’s actually written on the keys), is something like this:

And now?

Now let’s consult the map and find out which way we’re going!

Look at the top row of keys. The first line is with the shift key pressed, the second line without.

Which means…

If I press the numbers on my keyboard, I won’t get what I expect…

(I give up, I’m going back to typing this on my Italian keyboard as the M, the A and the comma are all in different places, too.)

Got it!

The accented characters are mostly where the numbers are supposed to be….

é = 2
è = 7
ç = 9
à = 0

Oh, and where it says M on my keyboard, THAT’s the comma.

,,,,

And the M is a line up from where it usually is, to the right of the L.

mmmmmm

Wow, that’s perverse…

OK, so what I plan to do is print out the above image and keep it by my computer. Or tuck it in the cover of my smartphone.

Then, whenever I switch to FRA I can use it to find the characters I need!

Like a lot of British people, I studied French at school for what felt like years and years.

But again, like a lot of people, I stopped learning French (or any foreign language) at the age of sixteen and never took it up again.

For a few years, I could get by in the language, based on youthful enthusiasm and on what I remembered from school. I even, briefly, had a French girlfried, who didn’t speak English. We got on just fine.

But, as I got older, what I thought I knew just faded away.

That said, I now live in Italy, and have more or less mastered Italian, which is very similar to French, in many respects.

So similar, in fact, it seems a shame not to go back and have another go, especially now there are so many great resources on the internet.

So as I try again wth the language, I’ll post links to useful stuff I find out there.

Perhaps there’ll also be the occasional article with helpful tips…